‘Everyone needs somewhere safe, dry and stable to live, but hundreds thousands of people find themselves without such security.’
Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

It’s become trite now to mention the fact that each Conservative party conference juxtaposes the destitute homeless people sleeping slumped in corners with the elites rolling out of bars after emptying bottles of bubbly. It should sting the moral conscience, but it does not, because individuals have inured themselves to the existence of homelessness. We shrug when asked for change, teaching our expression to harden, and refuse to acknowledge the human misery increasingly in front of us on the street.

To solve homelessness sounds easy in practice: give someone a home. But the housing policies offered by our political leaders are not remotely radical enough to achieve this, and leave us trapped in an entirely dysfunctional market. The housing and communities secretary, James Brokenshire, has announced plans at Birmingham to increase stamp duty for foreign buyers. This does little to change the fact that investors buy up homes not to live in, but to sit empty, then spit out profit as asset lockers. Labour’s plans to charge double council tax on second homes may raise money to help homeless people in the worst-affected areas, but we still live in a society where millions of people cannot afford even one home.

May acts to tackle housing crisis by imposing levy on foreign buyers

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The political bind we find ourselves in is intrinsically linked to the acceptance as doctrine that housing should be treated as any other tool in a free market system. Everyone needs somewhere safe, dry and stable to live, but thousands of people find themselves without such security, sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation. While homes are bought and sold for profit, there is no incentive for private developers to build the volume of housing needed to bring prices down.

Our homes are too expensive in many areas, and poor quality in others. Some people own multiple homes, while some are forced to live on the streets. Yet the prospect of house prices falling terrifies politicians and homeowners alike – that someone might make less profit than anticipated is deemed deeply unfair. But if you treat housing stock as a stake in a card game you have to take the losses with the gains. When stockbrokers bundled up junk housing loans before the financial crash, it represented little more than gambling, with the shelter people live in functioning as the stake.

For decades, the neoliberal consensus has held fast in the political and public imagination, with tremendous message discipline that markets are not just good or functional but the only possible option for configuring the services we use and the institutions we participate in. That some people make a profit from housing while others are plunged into stress, poverty and danger because their income denies them a secure place to live is accepted as an unfortunate downside of the market. With each UK housing crisis, politicians have responded by attempting to tinker with the functions of the market, introducing increases to stamp duty, for example, or putting up interest rates (before they passed this power to the Bank of England).

This dogma is slowly being eroded: young people in particular are subject to the worst vagaries of the housing crisis, forcing them to pay eye-watering sums in rent, often up to half their monthly earnings. When people’s experience of capitalism is of a rickety system that squeezes out profit without offering the basic services it purports to, the mood turns against it. Support for nationalising rail services in the UK is high because every exorbitant ticket price, late or cancelled train and dreadful quality carriage turns individuals further against privatisation. Now most young people are completely disenchanted with the free market in housing, and older people see their children’s prospects of bringing up a family in a stable home diminishing. Capitalism is in crisis, and housing is the focus of people’s growing fury.

‘Some people own multiple homes, while some are are forced to live on the streets.’ Photograph: Dinendra Haria/Rex/Shutterstock

But what can we do? Building more housing seems a simple answer, but if it’s yet more rabbit-hutch luxury flats nothing will change. Developers are in business to make a profit from housing, not to act as a benevolent force for social good. Building more social housing helps, and the millions that were built after the second world war gave people in slum housing an incredible opportunity to lay down roots in communities, in well-designed, spacious and totally affordable homes. But Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy in the 1980s shifted millions of homes from the control of local authorities and bundled them into the private sector, where the obsession with house prices has grown, and helped fuel today’s crisis.

The idea seems radical now, but so too was the NHS. The horror of war led to previous traditions being contested. The endurance and severity of the housing crisis is pushing more and more people to similarly radical positions and ideas. Our politicians should be far more radical, given how swiftly people are tiring of profit being put before people. The public mood is ripe for a complete overhaul of the housing market, as the foundations of capitalism look dangerously weak.